Recovering the Monstrous and the Sublime

           Nietzsche's youthful lucubration on Greek tragedy is one of the most familiar of all the moments of the modern reception of the Classics.  But lost under the Dionysiac frenzy are the details of a very particular obsession with Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.

To call a work a “Classic” suggests a corollary, “success” – indeed, success so unmitigated, so spectacular, that any text which warrants inclusion in the Classical canon is guaranteed a certain timelessness, and is from that point forward accorded automatic merit.  But what happens if a text “fails?”  Could any text that fails – aesthetically or otherwise – ever be considered Classic?  Is the notion of “failure” utterly foreign to what it means to be “Classical?”

William Munford was born 15 August 1775 in Mecklenburg County, Virginia to a distinguished family.  In his youth, Munford studied Greek and Latin at Petersburg Academy until the age of twelve, at which time he entered The College of William and Mary.  After graduating with honors, he benefitted from the tutelage of George Wythe – signer of the Declaration of Independence and a “second Socrates,” according to Munford – who encouraged him to keep up with his Greek and to embark on a career of public service.  By the time of Munford’s death in 1825, he had indeed enjoyed great success

The field of classical receptions has sought antiquity everywhere, it seems, but the North Sea. With few exceptions, notably William Mullen’s essay “Sailing Homer’s Baltic” (2007) and Felice Vinci’s controversial The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales (2005), the relationship between Mediterranean texts and non-monastic Northern Europe has received scant attention from classical philologists. Yet the lack of interest in these receptions is surprising, given the overwhelming number of Latin texts known to the Anglo-Saxons.

This paper examines the reception of Apuleius’ “Cupid and Psyche” in South Korean manhwa, an indigenous genre of animated film (not to be confused with manga, a Japanese form better known in the west). Since the mid-2000s, one particularly successful manhwa, Olympus Guardian, has mined Bulfinch’s retellings to bring Greco-Roman mythology to millions of children in the Republic of Korea (ROK) via Saturday morning cartoons and comic books. Of all the show’s episodes, “The Love of Eros and Psyche,” ranks among its most popular.

This paper analyzes three short prose narratives from the Romantic period: John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), Lord Byron’s ‘Augustus Darvell: A Fragment of a Ghost Story’ (1819) and Mary Shelley’s ‘Valerius, the Reanimated Roman’ (1819). These narratives all depict British travelers in Greece and Rome who find themselves faced with Gothic horrors amid the monuments of the classical past.